All posts tagged daily prompt

I would have sworn on my life that I was standing in my living room. Something felt odd, but there was the oversized couch slumping on the East wall just as usual. The same stains dotted its cheap cloth surface. Magazines were carelessly strewn about on the coffee table. I looked toward the window. The blinds were down and slit open just enough to let the last light of the day through. The red seeped through the blinds and expanded through the air, casting an eerie glow on everything.

“This has to be a dream,” I said to myself. Everything appeared perfectly real, but something felt wrong. I looked down at my hands. They were lined and creased in all the right places. I saw the faint color of veins under the surface of my palms. Real…but I could not shake the feeling.

“I need a test,” I decided. “Details. I’ll look for details. If this place is a dream, There’s got to be a limit to how much detail I can explore.” I glanced around the room trying to decide what to investigate. After a moment of contemplation, I decided to examine the rug under my feet.

It was perfectly normal. The geometric border of green and cream around the edge of the rug was just as it should be. The floral accents in light rose twirled in the corners, “God, why did my mom pick this thing?!” It was ugly. The twirled yarn of the fringe laid like seaweed across the floor. It looked right. I was almost convinced, but I needed a closer look.

I crouched down on my hands and knees. My face went down to examine the geometric patterns in earnest. I looked like an ape searching for bugs on his mate as my fingers rapidly separated the fibers of the rug and my eyes peered for detail. Each fiber of twirled fabric moved as my fingers parted them. I saw their attaching points, where they twisted, and where they ended. I saw the barriers between one area of color and another as my fingers crossed from one geometric pattern to another. I was convinced.

I stood amazed and said to myself, “I was wrong. This IS real.”

Then I woke.

_____________________________

This happened to me when I was around 18 years old. I had another dream several nights later where I performed an equally mind-boggling test; I caught my face in a mirror and did another detail check. I got only inches away from the mirror and peered into my reflection. I took careful note of my iris. It was blue and freckled with tinges of hazel near the pupil, just like in real life. The detail was astonishing. What sold me was when I happened to see a Coca-Cola can reflected in the mirror and the logo was correctly inverted in a mirror image. I concluded the dream was real then woke.

This tells me a few things.

The mind can imagine seemingly impossible detail.

At least two parts of my mind were working independently of eachother; the part that was trying to convince me it was real and supplied the detail (The Convincer), and the part which suspected it was false and scrutinized (The Conscious).

It’s a little disturbing that these two different parts acted like they had diametric agendas.

The Convincer part was aware of what the Conscious was thinking, but the Conscious was clueless about the existence of the Convincer.

I will have to ponder these things some more. This relationship between the Convincer and the Conscious seems like a microcosm of the relationship between God and man; or at least my God and myself.